Hopefully in by tomorrow. I’ve got two spots to shore up, shadewise, and then the only reason we’ll ever run the AC is b/c of humidity, or b/c the baby still has no neck.

EDIT/UPDATE: It’s really easy to tell clumping vs. running bamboo, I now know. Just look at the roots. If the roots are trying to turn into bamboo, it’s a runner, and beware. If the roots look like Q. Random Plant, you’re probably okay.

Ireland has joined the ranks of those now threatening serious fines against anybody who criticizes religion. Any religion. Which is a laugh riot, considering that the practice of one religion inherently constitutes the critique of other religions.

::shakes head::

When I teach my students about the difference between the American Enlightenment (aka, religious tolerance brought about by religious people) and the European Enlightenment (all hail the State, all serve the State, or else), folks get real surprised.

I sent her to the doctor’s after she insisted that she was getting better and the back of my brain finally twigged to “self, she’s not coughing anything up, b/c she hasn’t used more than a single kleenex all weekend. Plus, some of that sounds bronchial.”

So she goes to the doctor, who tells her “yeah, this stuff used to kill people a hundred years ago, here’s a bunch of prescriptions.” So, go me, Anna’s going to get better and we’ll be hunting people down for sociability really darned soon.

Goldman’s role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren’t in IPOs but in mortgages.

All right, I’m officially a fan of Matt Taibbi. And it’s issues precisely like this that are going to have me investing uber-conservatively, in annuities and other instruments where I can actually see the fine print before signing*, rather than having much of anything to do with stocks. If I hadn’t been working for a company that was blatantly letting loan applicants get away with murder while the underwriters were pretty much told “suck it up or you’re out of a job,” I’d have fallen for it, too.

*not that annuities are a panacea – they can also be full of fail. BUT, they tend to be unromantic and thus fly under the scam-radar.

But Sullivan’s been “all cannons on automatic” for a while now… if he’s of “no party or clique,” why hasn’t he been offering a running account of Biden, as well? They were both, after all, VP candidates in the same race. IF she’s fundamentally wackier than “we drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon” Biden (and that was only one of the “what planet are you from” lines he tossed off in the campaign debates), then let’s hear it. But if she and Biden are mental bedmates, let’s spread the vituperations around, eh?

Besides wanting to shower at the mere thought of connecting said dots, I suspect that not only is Worstall correct, but that this may also go some ways towards explaining the generally-degrading treatment of women within porn (and why “porn-for-women” is such a dramatically different beast. Then again, porn-for-women can also be defined as HGTV, which tends to fill itself with as much misandry as its counterpart does misogyny, so….).

Perhaps, like all things, this is the evil of the boob tube (unintentional) at work — it makes you passive. In some cases, perhaps the world benefits by making a certain sort of person more and more passive? The rapist has that evil itch (which, unless I’m well out of date, is more to do with power than sex) satisfied via porn, and then goes out and buys a pizza or something?

From a horrifying little work by RJ Rummel (don’t read this before bed):

The one factor present in all this Chinese democide, and that in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and other such cases of genocide, is arbitrary power….

Power kills. And absolute power kills en masse. Consider–the Soviet Union, 61,911,000 people murdered; the Chinese communists, 38,000,000; the Nazis, 17,000,000; the Chinese Nationalists, 10,214,000; the Japanese militarists in World War II, 5,890,000; the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, 2,000,000; West Pakistan over East Pakistan, 2,000,000; Turkey during and after World War I, 1,500,000; and Yugoslavia after World War II, 1,105,000.